Battlestar Galactica is not reinventing scifi -- its following in the footsteps of Babylon 5. Its an entirely incremental improvement, if an improvement at all.
I wasn't the biggest B5 fan, but it brought the arcing storyline, the character development, and the disappearance of technobabble to science fiction. Galactica follows that tradition, but it doesn't *really* blaze some new and never-forged path.
Microsoft doesn't want to encourage the Mac as an enterprise workstation platform -- it would compete too closely with Windows and Office for Windows. I'm pretty sure this is a strategic decision on Microsoft's part.
But there are two issues at hand. It's important to understand them, and they are oft confused.
1) Kiosk security. If somebody is looking over your shoulder (physically or digitally) it really doesn't matter how secure your password is. A 64-character password is no more secure than an 8-character one is somebody is filming your typing or using a hardware/software keylogger. This is where password changes come in. Changing your password every few weeks (maybe using a rotation of a few passwords) seems to make some sense here, if you use your password often on suspect terminals. If, on the other hand, you are generally using your password in your hermetically sealed server room, it might not be all that important.
2) Brute-force, which is what this article seems more to be dealing with. This problem is EASILY solved in a way that is far, far, too often overlooked. Simply do what I've done on my own system: temporarily disable the account after three unsuccessful password attempts. Furthermore, log all login attempts and report the number of failed logins since last successful (gotomypc.com has done this very nicely).
There are all sorts of human (i.e., non-password strengthening) methods to improve security. What I've done (or, more acurately, have had my employees set up on high-security client systems), additionally, is made it so that the accounts can only be unlocked via a special account with limited privilages (mainly to reset this feature and to reset user passwords). This account is only enabled for local, physical access.
And Steve Jobs is clearly the George Eastman he talks about.
I'm not a Mac fanatic (I don't own one, but I do work with them regularly), but it seems to me that this guy is clearly elucidating what is Apple's strategy: make stuff easy to use. For everybody. Without any pain.
I mean, this guy would *love* the free chess app that comes with OS X.
The calendar is only half the story. For businesses, its a complete PIM solution -- which includes exchange at the backend. You won't see widespread adoption of anything other than Outlook at the corporate level until you've come up with something BETTER (not as good, BETTER -- and not just in the intangables like reliability, speed, backend ease, etc.) but a complete package that's easier for Jane Receptionist and Joe CEO to use. That's the real problem. Not even Apple has something like that.
Internet Explorer I understand. But with good Antivirus software (InoculateIT, Norton) Outlook really isn't a problem. I use Outlook (and I reccommend it to clients) because it really is the best mail/contact/calendar (integrated PIM) available for Windows.
Keep your antivirus up-to-date. Outlook won't give you any problems. If you're particularly worried, get an antivirus/anti-spam solution like SpamCOP
I agree with your post, but I think the suggested pricing is *really* high.
Visual Studio components already only cost abou $100/each (for the standard version, which is all *most* people need). I think the express versions, which really have no reason to be bundled together, are at most going to go for $25-$50. But I think its more likely that MS will just give them away for free, *or* just ship them with all future versions of windows.
That's not due to the government, that's what I owe to my fellow citizens. I owe nothing to the gov't.
Isn't that sort of what government by the people, for the people is all about? What you owe to your fellow citizens is also owed the government. As long as this is a (marginally) democratic system, you have responsibilities -- to the state -- as a citizen, including the responsibility to defend it in times of war (there's no pro-Iraq here, which I don't view as defense, I'm thinking more WWII-style conflict). One could argue that this is a citizens right to his fellow citizens, but I think that argument starts to prove the point: in a democracy (remaining a democracy, before slipping into dictatorship), the difference between one's obligations to one's fellow citizens en masse and one's obligations to the state is simply a semantic one.
This makes a lot of sense for GM organisms, particular crops -- open-source genetics. It means that farmers can reap the advantages (pun intended) of GM crops without the nasty side effect of becoming a slave to agrobusiness, which is one of the primary (and most legitimate) arguments against the widespread introduction of GMO in the third world.
For the moment, lets assume that we're only dealing with basic GM (accellerated hybridization) and not transgenic crops -- although, click here for a great article about how GM crops will save the environment. You can also hit up this editorial in, of all places, the Yale Daily News.
This is Actually MORE Secure
on
RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 1
Has anybody else realized that the RFID method is actually more secure than the current hand-your-card-to-the-cashier method?
When you hand your card to the cashier, anybody -- and I mean anybody, particularly the cashier -- with a decent memory, or even just a piece of paper, can glance at the number and jot it down. If you're really worried about this, you'd be really worried about cashiers as a potential source of credit card fraud -- they, after all, get to see the number whenever they want. Especially in places where the number is on the receipt, whats to stop a dishonest cashier from just taking a receipt? Pretty much anybody, including a would-be-theif, can get a job in a grocery store accepting credit cards. Lets be real people. Or, for that matter, the guy behind me in line with a concealed digital camera. The possibilities for visual credit card data theft are basically endless.
On the other hand, waving my wallet over the RFID reader, never taking the card out, now that's secure! Particular if the system offers some sort of data encryption, which would make the credit card end hard to fake (that, I imagine, is the primary security concern -- spoofing stolen numbers).
Also, let's remember folks: these are credit cards! Has anybody else ever been the victim of credit card fraud? (I have -- by a dishonest sales clerk at the Gap! They caught the bitch, though). When your card is declined and your statement shows $12,000 in charges to Tiffany's jewelry online, you just call up MasterCard and report it. They cancel your card, start an inquiry. As long as they figure out that its really fraud, you are COMPLETELY off the hook. Its all on the credit card companies.
Honestly, I don't think the RFID switch really makes fraud easier. If it did, it would certainly be against the best interests of the credit card companies to introduce it -- after all, the liability is all on them. This really, perhaps unlike Wal-Mart, is an instance of customer convenience.
That's where Apple's going. They don't so much care about your non-Apple keyboard, and they want your digital music player to be the iPod -- but just so that it plugs in right with their software.
This poses a *huge* security risk which should be considered. What's to stop someone from checking out a disk of OSS and returning another disk of the same software, this one with a worm or built in DOS attack? You'd need to run an MD5 on each disk after it was returned, which libraries don't really have the capability for. Or, you'd need to find some way to identify the disks that is difficult to copy, like a holographic sticker that changes when removed (like the warranty stickers on some HP home computers).
Otherwise, such software is just begging to be tampered with by some wise-ass 17-year-old -- or somebody malicious, even.
FireWire 400 repeaters have gotten fairly inexpensive. FireWire is going to give you better performance than Gigabit, too. In my experience, at least with the G5s we've been using, firewire networking lets us access external FireWire drives at pretty much local speed -- fast enough to do real-time video transcoding, anyway.
A Few More Two-Word Sentences: Firewire 800! Fiber optic!
Okay, so you can't actually get pre-made solutions yet that use these standards. But the 1394b specification (FireWire 800) allows for glass-fiber connections up to 100 meters. Future FireWire 800 hubs are expected to have one or two optical ports plus copper ports. You can then string hubs together using fiber.
Okay, so I use StarOffice as my primary word processor and spreadsheet. But I also use MS Outlook. Why? Because I have to use Windows for a variety of reasons (primarily because its the only platform for which AutoCAD is available), and because Outlook is simply the best PIM available (not just e-mail, but everything). Now, assuming you use a third-party AntiVirus (we use Norton), then Outlook really *is* the safest e-mail program to have.
I do consulting. And I do virus calls for my clients. More often than not, some stupid user has clicked a file or opened an attachment they shouldn't have. With Norton + Eudora or Mozilla, a stupid user can execute viral code. But Norton integrates so well with Outlook (not least, I'm told, because of Microsoft's APIs) that its virtually impossible (once Norton is installeD) to become infected.
I wonder... These are derivitive work (translation) of a works in the public domain (the bible). IANAL (and my staff lawyer isn't in till next Wednesday) but I do know that different rules apply to works derived from works already in the public domain, particularly translations, which have a whole sub-set of IP rules. Anybody else weigh in?
This story reeks of fish. True, what he describes is indeed Apple's return policy. But this guy's tale has more holes than a Alpine cheese. I'm not a die-hard Mac user (I run a five-platform company) but this is just anti-Apple bullshit -- specially when you consider that the two companies he picked for comparison, IBM and HP, are two of the only companies that *will* let you return customized equipment, and then only under certain circumstances. Read the fine print at Dell, Sun, a copy of an old pre-HP Compaq return policy (I have one in a filing cabinet here in my office), and you'll find that this is just standard fare. Some will let you return certain customized systems under certain circumstances, but for the most part, you buy something different than today's special, you play for keeps.
IANAL, but I happen to have one on staff. Major corporations, like Apple, almost never appear in small claims. They will either try to have the case moved to a higher court (a slow and expensive process, because it almost always requires that the consumer hire a lawyer), or they will simply not show up and pay whatever fine (the max is usually $5,000) the judge throws at them. Corporate lawyers are expensive. At the rate Apple has to pay its lawyers, it just doesn't make sense for them to show up in court.
-Shylock
Something's a little fishy here...
on
The Trouble with RFID
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· Score: 2, Insightful
every RFID chip has a unique serial number
I have a question: how long before this system becomes unwieldy. If we're going to track every product sold worldwide, how big will the string have to be? Furthermore, at what point will a database of said string's become unwieldy, and at what point will it become worthless to maintain all that data?
The retail RFID plans I've seen don't have a unique serial number for every item. They have a unique serial number for every type of item, kind of like a barcode. Granted, that may pose some minor privacy issues of its own. But those problems are minor, and no worse than paying with a credit card.
More to the point, RFIDs have the potential to save businesses billions -- kind of like barcodes did. And, like with barcodes, those savings will most probably be passed to the consumer.
I think that a good analogy can be drawn here to religious fundamentalism. Islam, for instance, is a peaceful religion practiced primarily by decent people. That hasn't stopped others from twisting it into an instrument of terror. Same idea with the virus. Undoubtedly, the attack on SCOs servers shows that the virus writer had a particular political motive, and that the virus writer was most likely a Linux user -- or somebody sympathizing with the open source movement. That doesn't make Linux users evil, just as 9/11 didn't make Muslims evil. I think the rest of the analogy is self-explanatory.
1) Get people in the door. Three weeks ago, I wouldn't spend $400 for an iPod. But now my kid brother has one, and uses it all the time, and I want one. Apple wants to hook users with a 2 gig version, then get them to step up to 10 or 20 or 40 when their collection grows.
2) The standards war. You got it. Why spend $200 on a 128 mb flash player, when you can get an iPod jr., 2 gigs of storage, for $100? (or maybe $150). Apple cinches up the MP3 player market, but good -- and wins the standards war in the process.
3) A cheap but well designed product would do wonders for Apple's brand name. iPods and iTunes sell Macs to previous Windows users, but not many people have iPods, because they are expensive. Drop the price, and iPods become more prevalent -- and more people look into buying Macs.
For instance, here in CT, computer recycling is *the law*. You can drop off old PCs at any town dump/recycling center, they have a special place for them.
My experience with this has to do with intercontinential sailboat racing, both trans-atlantic and trans-pacific, where we use a laptop and GPS system for navigation (and, occasionally, to watch DVDs). Since the 60 foot yacht I sometimes crew on (I'm the navigator), is in the middle of nowhere quite often, our power concerns are similar to yours. We use a diesel generator to charge onboard 12v batteries, and have backup solar chargers for emergencies.
One thing you should probably think about, particularly considering your means of generating power (solar), is how you're going to jack this thing into your power system. You'll probably want a transformer to have some AC power in this cabin, but that's an extraordinarily inefficient way of using electricity.
If you go with a desktop computer, the power supply is going to expect AC input. The laptop, on the other hand, is going to have a power brick and a DC jack on the laptop.
For optimum power efficiency, you should get a laptop and then buy a 12V regulator, and a car-lighter type plug. The wattage is important, in terms of power consumption, but the voltage is equally so.
The HP/Compaq laptop we use onboard (its a ze1210, which is a basic consumer model of a year or so vintage -- runs Athlon with PowerNow). Using the DC adapter, the strain on the ship's battery is noticable, but not huge -- much less than the radar, for instance. When we run it off of one of our AC plugs (we only have one, and we almost *never* use it, the transformer usually stays disconnected), its a huge power drain -- more so than our radar array.
So, definately a laptop. Wire your cabin for DC. And consider looking at boating technology guides in general. They probably most closely approximate what you're trying to do.
I think you're cars/trains analogy doesn't really hold; those are two products for basically two completely different purposes that have no direct-market competition.
Nevertheless, I did a little more research. While cable broadband is pretty much monopolized (nobody really has a choice of cable company, its true), DSL ISPs are not. In my area, i have a choice of at least six DSL ISPs (Earthlink, AOL, SBC/Yahoo! (the phone company), and three local concerns), and that was just a cursory survey. Same goes for five other area codes I checked. I understand the complexities of DSL service (ISP plus telco as two different companies is an unwieldy relationship at best), but you still have choice.
If the quality of your DSL is bad, and thus everybody is switching to cable (which is true in my neighborhood), then the telco/ISPs will likely take measures to upgrade service (if they know what's good for them, otherwise, they loose the market). This has already happened in my nieghborhood, where SBC made some major upgrades to better accomodate DSL. My neighbor gets DSL through Mindspring/Earthlink (the line is, of course, provided by SBC), and she has noticed dramatic improvements in service quality in the last six months.
First, I'd just like to point out that the original thread concerned dial-up and not broadband. With dial-up, what I said is certainly true. I will admit that its not true in monopoly situations.
As long is you don't live in the stix (which you probably don't, seeing as you have access to BOTH cable and DSL), then you will always have the option of T1 or Frame Relay. This may be expensive, but, again, the market. Youi also probably have the option of business DSL (SDSL), which is more expensive but always unlimited, because its generally marketed for web hosting. They may be expensive alternatives, but, hey, there's the market...
Umm, actually, yes. For a long time, Microsoft had the best product available. *best* does not mean perfect, it just means best. Then Microsoft had problems. So other OSs and Office Suites (OS X, Linux, OpenOffice) came to the fore. Sometimes market monopolies take a while to erode. But they are only eroded by superior products. CIP: the resurrection of the Mac and OS X.
The economics of "equal alternatives," which is what you are essentially describing, does not exactly function the way traditional systems might. The truth of the matter is, the market for both of those things you mention is extraordinarily small. Most people who want an OS that runs Windows programs and opens Microsoft Office docs are perfectly content to run Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The problem is, you can't phrase things in those economic terms.
A better way to phrase the question is "a better operating system" or "a better office suite" both of which are (market generic) descriptions for things to which there is a market.
Back to the ISP issue: using "ISP" as a generic market category, we can say that some people would fine "truly unlimited" ISPs to be suprerior to limited ones. Thus, a market for truly unlimited ISPs will probably exist, providing that there is no market monopoly (which will always be true of dialup, but is not always be true of broadband)
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The iMovie demo and tutorial files and the Garageband clips easily take up 3-5 gigs of space.
Battlestar Galactica is not reinventing scifi -- its following in the footsteps of Babylon 5. Its an entirely incremental improvement, if an improvement at all. I wasn't the biggest B5 fan, but it brought the arcing storyline, the character development, and the disappearance of technobabble to science fiction. Galactica follows that tradition, but it doesn't *really* blaze some new and never-forged path.
Microsoft doesn't want to encourage the Mac as an enterprise workstation platform -- it would compete too closely with Windows and Office for Windows. I'm pretty sure this is a strategic decision on Microsoft's part.
1) Kiosk security. If somebody is looking over your shoulder (physically or digitally) it really doesn't matter how secure your password is. A 64-character password is no more secure than an 8-character one is somebody is filming your typing or using a hardware/software keylogger. This is where password changes come in. Changing your password every few weeks (maybe using a rotation of a few passwords) seems to make some sense here, if you use your password often on suspect terminals. If, on the other hand, you are generally using your password in your hermetically sealed server room, it might not be all that important.
2) Brute-force, which is what this article seems more to be dealing with. This problem is EASILY solved in a way that is far, far, too often overlooked. Simply do what I've done on my own system: temporarily disable the account after three unsuccessful password attempts. Furthermore, log all login attempts and report the number of failed logins since last successful (gotomypc.com has done this very nicely).
There are all sorts of human (i.e., non-password strengthening) methods to improve security. What I've done (or, more acurately, have had my employees set up on high-security client systems), additionally, is made it so that the accounts can only be unlocked via a special account with limited privilages (mainly to reset this feature and to reset user passwords). This account is only enabled for local, physical access.
The system is pretty cumbersome to brute force.
And Steve Jobs is clearly the George Eastman he talks about.
I'm not a Mac fanatic (I don't own one, but I do work with them regularly), but it seems to me that this guy is clearly elucidating what is Apple's strategy: make stuff easy to use. For everybody. Without any pain.
I mean, this guy would *love* the free chess app that comes with OS X.
-Shylock
The calendar is only half the story. For businesses, its a complete PIM solution -- which includes exchange at the backend. You won't see widespread adoption of anything other than Outlook at the corporate level until you've come up with something BETTER (not as good, BETTER -- and not just in the intangables like reliability, speed, backend ease, etc.) but a complete package that's easier for Jane Receptionist and Joe CEO to use. That's the real problem. Not even Apple has something like that.
Keep your antivirus up-to-date. Outlook won't give you any problems. If you're particularly worried, get an antivirus/anti-spam solution like SpamCOP
Visual Studio components already only cost abou $100/each (for the standard version, which is all *most* people need). I think the express versions, which really have no reason to be bundled together, are at most going to go for $25-$50. But I think its more likely that MS will just give them away for free, *or* just ship them with all future versions of windows.
Isn't that sort of what government by the people, for the people is all about? What you owe to your fellow citizens is also owed the government. As long as this is a (marginally) democratic system, you have responsibilities -- to the state -- as a citizen, including the responsibility to defend it in times of war (there's no pro-Iraq here, which I don't view as defense, I'm thinking more WWII-style conflict). One could argue that this is a citizens right to his fellow citizens, but I think that argument starts to prove the point: in a democracy (remaining a democracy, before slipping into dictatorship), the difference between one's obligations to one's fellow citizens en masse and one's obligations to the state is simply a semantic one.
For the moment, lets assume that we're only dealing with basic GM (accellerated hybridization) and not transgenic crops -- although, click here for a great article about how GM crops will save the environment. You can also hit up this editorial in, of all places, the Yale Daily News.
When you hand your card to the cashier, anybody -- and I mean anybody, particularly the cashier -- with a decent memory, or even just a piece of paper, can glance at the number and jot it down. If you're really worried about this, you'd be really worried about cashiers as a potential source of credit card fraud -- they, after all, get to see the number whenever they want. Especially in places where the number is on the receipt, whats to stop a dishonest cashier from just taking a receipt? Pretty much anybody, including a would-be-theif, can get a job in a grocery store accepting credit cards. Lets be real people. Or, for that matter, the guy behind me in line with a concealed digital camera. The possibilities for visual credit card data theft are basically endless.
On the other hand, waving my wallet over the RFID reader, never taking the card out, now that's secure! Particular if the system offers some sort of data encryption, which would make the credit card end hard to fake (that, I imagine, is the primary security concern -- spoofing stolen numbers).
Also, let's remember folks: these are credit cards! Has anybody else ever been the victim of credit card fraud? (I have -- by a dishonest sales clerk at the Gap! They caught the bitch, though). When your card is declined and your statement shows $12,000 in charges to Tiffany's jewelry online, you just call up MasterCard and report it. They cancel your card, start an inquiry. As long as they figure out that its really fraud, you are COMPLETELY off the hook. Its all on the credit card companies.
Honestly, I don't think the RFID switch really makes fraud easier. If it did, it would certainly be against the best interests of the credit card companies to introduce it -- after all, the liability is all on them. This really, perhaps unlike Wal-Mart, is an instance of customer convenience.
That's where Apple's going. They don't so much care about your non-Apple keyboard, and they want your digital music player to be the iPod -- but just so that it plugs in right with their software.
iTunes sells iPods. iLife sells Macs.
Otherwise, such software is just begging to be tampered with by some wise-ass 17-year-old -- or somebody malicious, even.
A Few More Two-Word Sentences: Firewire 800! Fiber optic!
Okay, so you can't actually get pre-made solutions yet that use these standards. But the 1394b specification (FireWire 800) allows for glass-fiber connections up to 100 meters. Future FireWire 800 hubs are expected to have one or two optical ports plus copper ports. You can then string hubs together using fiber.
I do consulting. And I do virus calls for my clients. More often than not, some stupid user has clicked a file or opened an attachment they shouldn't have. With Norton + Eudora or Mozilla, a stupid user can execute viral code. But Norton integrates so well with Outlook (not least, I'm told, because of Microsoft's APIs) that its virtually impossible (once Norton is installeD) to become infected.
That's my $0.02.
I wonder... These are derivitive work (translation) of a works in the public domain (the bible). IANAL (and my staff lawyer isn't in till next Wednesday) but I do know that different rules apply to works derived from works already in the public domain, particularly translations, which have a whole sub-set of IP rules. Anybody else weigh in?
IANAL, but I happen to have one on staff. Major corporations, like Apple, almost never appear in small claims. They will either try to have the case moved to a higher court (a slow and expensive process, because it almost always requires that the consumer hire a lawyer), or they will simply not show up and pay whatever fine (the max is usually $5,000) the judge throws at them. Corporate lawyers are expensive. At the rate Apple has to pay its lawyers, it just doesn't make sense for them to show up in court.
-Shylock
I have a question: how long before this system becomes unwieldy. If we're going to track every product sold worldwide, how big will the string have to be? Furthermore, at what point will a database of said string's become unwieldy, and at what point will it become worthless to maintain all that data?
The retail RFID plans I've seen don't have a unique serial number for every item. They have a unique serial number for every type of item, kind of like a barcode. Granted, that may pose some minor privacy issues of its own. But those problems are minor, and no worse than paying with a credit card.
More to the point, RFIDs have the potential to save businesses billions -- kind of like barcodes did. And, like with barcodes, those savings will most probably be passed to the consumer.
I think that a good analogy can be drawn here to religious fundamentalism. Islam, for instance, is a peaceful religion practiced primarily by decent people. That hasn't stopped others from twisting it into an instrument of terror. Same idea with the virus. Undoubtedly, the attack on SCOs servers shows that the virus writer had a particular political motive, and that the virus writer was most likely a Linux user -- or somebody sympathizing with the open source movement. That doesn't make Linux users evil, just as 9/11 didn't make Muslims evil. I think the rest of the analogy is self-explanatory.
2) The standards war. You got it. Why spend $200 on a 128 mb flash player, when you can get an iPod jr., 2 gigs of storage, for $100? (or maybe $150). Apple cinches up the MP3 player market, but good -- and wins the standards war in the process. 3) A cheap but well designed product would do wonders for Apple's brand name. iPods and iTunes sell Macs to previous Windows users, but not many people have iPods, because they are expensive. Drop the price, and iPods become more prevalent -- and more people look into buying Macs.
For instance, here in CT, computer recycling is *the law*. You can drop off old PCs at any town dump/recycling center, they have a special place for them.
One thing you should probably think about, particularly considering your means of generating power (solar), is how you're going to jack this thing into your power system. You'll probably want a transformer to have some AC power in this cabin, but that's an extraordinarily inefficient way of using electricity.
If you go with a desktop computer, the power supply is going to expect AC input. The laptop, on the other hand, is going to have a power brick and a DC jack on the laptop.
For optimum power efficiency, you should get a laptop and then buy a 12V regulator, and a car-lighter type plug. The wattage is important, in terms of power consumption, but the voltage is equally so.
The HP/Compaq laptop we use onboard (its a ze1210, which is a basic consumer model of a year or so vintage -- runs Athlon with PowerNow). Using the DC adapter, the strain on the ship's battery is noticable, but not huge -- much less than the radar, for instance. When we run it off of one of our AC plugs (we only have one, and we almost *never* use it, the transformer usually stays disconnected), its a huge power drain -- more so than our radar array.
So, definately a laptop. Wire your cabin for DC. And consider looking at boating technology guides in general. They probably most closely approximate what you're trying to do.
-Shylock
Nevertheless, I did a little more research. While cable broadband is pretty much monopolized (nobody really has a choice of cable company, its true), DSL ISPs are not. In my area, i have a choice of at least six DSL ISPs (Earthlink, AOL, SBC/Yahoo! (the phone company), and three local concerns), and that was just a cursory survey. Same goes for five other area codes I checked. I understand the complexities of DSL service (ISP plus telco as two different companies is an unwieldy relationship at best), but you still have choice.
If the quality of your DSL is bad, and thus everybody is switching to cable (which is true in my neighborhood), then the telco/ISPs will likely take measures to upgrade service (if they know what's good for them, otherwise, they loose the market). This has already happened in my nieghborhood, where SBC made some major upgrades to better accomodate DSL. My neighbor gets DSL through Mindspring/Earthlink (the line is, of course, provided by SBC), and she has noticed dramatic improvements in service quality in the last six months.
As long is you don't live in the stix (which you probably don't, seeing as you have access to BOTH cable and DSL), then you will always have the option of T1 or Frame Relay. This may be expensive, but, again, the market. Youi also probably have the option of business DSL (SDSL), which is more expensive but always unlimited, because its generally marketed for web hosting. They may be expensive alternatives, but, hey, there's the market...
The economics of "equal alternatives," which is what you are essentially describing, does not exactly function the way traditional systems might. The truth of the matter is, the market for both of those things you mention is extraordinarily small. Most people who want an OS that runs Windows programs and opens Microsoft Office docs are perfectly content to run Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. The problem is, you can't phrase things in those economic terms.
A better way to phrase the question is "a better operating system" or "a better office suite" both of which are (market generic) descriptions for things to which there is a market.
Back to the ISP issue: using "ISP" as a generic market category, we can say that some people would fine "truly unlimited" ISPs to be suprerior to limited ones. Thus, a market for truly unlimited ISPs will probably exist, providing that there is no market monopoly (which will always be true of dialup, but is not always be true of broadband)